N.T Wright on NPP

[shackleton]

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_New_Perspectives.htm

 

[panta dokimazete]

But the main passage in question is of course Romans 2.1–16.

This passage has often been read differently. We heard yesterday that Augustine had problems with it (perhaps the only thing in common between Augustine and E. P. Sanders). That is hardly surprising; here is the first statement about justification in Romans, and lo and behold it affirms justification according to works! The doers of the law, he says, will be justified (2.13). Shock, horror; Paul cannot (so many have thought) have really meant it. So the passage has been treated as a hypothetical position which Paul then undermines by showing that nobody can actually achieve it; or, by Sanders for instance, as a piece of unassimilated Jewish preaching which Paul allows to stand even though it conflicts with other things he says. But all such theories are undermined by exegesis itself, not least by observing the many small but significant threads that stitch Romans 2 into the fabric of the letter as a whole. Paul means what he says. Granted, he redefines what ‘doing the law’ really means; he does this in chapter 8, and again in chapter 10, with a codicil in chapter 13. But he makes the point most compactly in Philippians 1.6: he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. The ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the self-help moralist. Nor are they the performance of the ethnically distinctive Jewish boundary-markers (sabbath, food-laws and circumcision). They are the things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation. In this way, Romans 8.1–17 provides the real answer to Romans 2.1–16. Why is there now ‘no condemnation’? Because, on the one hand, God has condemned sin in the flesh of Christ (let no-one say, as some have done, that this theme is absent in my work; it was and remains central in my thinking and my spirituality); and, on the other hand, because the Spirit is at work to do, within believers, what the Law could not do – ultimately, to give life, but a life that begins in the present with the putting to death of the deeds of the body and the obedient submission to the leading of the Spirit.

interesting...

 

[turmeric]

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_New_Perspectives.htm

And your question or comment is...

 

[panta dokimazete]

Specifically, this is interesting:

The ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day are not the unaided works of the self-help moralist. Nor are they the performance of the ethnically distinctive Jewish boundary-markers (sabbath, food-laws and circumcision). They are the things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation.

Who disagrees with this and why?

 

[turmeric]

Maybe it seems like a denial of imputation?

 

[Civbert]

Maybe it seems like a denial of imputation?

Also it blurs sanctification and justification. It implies to a works righteousness.

 

[Robin]

Here's a good resource (free MP3's) on NT Wright and NPP from Kim Riddlebarger's class:

http://christreformedinfo.squarespace.com/mp3s-and-real-audio-of-academy/

Be edified!

Robin

 

[panta dokimazete]

Also it blurs sanctification and justification. It implies to a works righteousness.

Does it really?

They are the things which show, rather, that one is in Christ; the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation.

If anything it looks like the Spirit's works righteousness in us...

 

[panta dokimazete]

Has anyone else read the article? Has Wright vindicated himself?

 

[Civbert]

Does it really?

I think it confuses when he says

"The ‘works’ in accordance with which the Christian will be vindicated on the last day ...

This seem to blend justification with the our works that are only a product of sanctification. It further confuses things because Wright's "vindication" is not based on the justifying work of Christ on the cross, rather it is:

the things which are produced in one’s life as a result of the Spirit’s indwelling and operation.

These works that are a product of the "indwelling of Christ" are rightly called products of sanctification and has no bearing what-so-ever on our justification. He calls it "vindication" but we have not need for it. We are already justified by Christ alone. And that being the case, then this future vindication is completely irrelevant to our salvation. And think he has failed to make the distinction between the justification that saves, with the sanctification that is a consequence of being justified. Wright's created categories which confuses them.

 

[panta dokimazete]

Take a look at this:

Is there then no ‘reckoning of righteousness’ in, for instance, Romans 5.14–21? Yes, there is; but my case is that this is not God’s own righteousness, or Christ’s own righteousness, that is reckoned to God’s redeemed people, but rather the fresh status of ‘covenant member’, and/or ‘justified sinner’, which is accredited to those who are in Christ, who have heard the gospel and responded with ‘the obedience of faith’.

......

Second, it emerges that justification, for Paul, is not (in Sanders’s terminology) how one ‘gets in’ to God’s people, but about God’s declaration that someone is in. In other words, it is all about assurance – as we should have known from reading Romans. I’ve said it before and this is the place to say it again: if we are thinking Paul’s thoughts after him, we are not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith. We are justified by faith by believing in the gospel itself – in other words, that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. If, in addition, we believe in justification by faith itself, we believe that, amazingly considering what God knows about us, we are now and for ever part of the family to every member of which God says what he said to Jesus at his baptism: you are my beloved child, with you I am well pleased.

 

[MW]

Has anyone else read the article? Has Wright vindicated himself?

No. He turns actual justification into declarative justification. Rom. 2 speaks of actual justification by legal obedience, that is personal, perfect, and perpetual obedience. Wright makes it a declarative eschatological sentence brought into the present on the basis of evangelical obedience, that is, obedience which is accepted on the basis of the perfect and perpetual righteousness of Christ alone.